| Death by Adventure: The Fundy Multi-Sport Race was supposed to be his introduction to adventure racing, but something went terribly wrong. Nine months later, those who knew him and those who tried to help still wonder: Why did René Arseneault have to die? By David Leach At first, it didn’t seem unusual to Bob Mawhinney that a kayaker, alone in the rebounding swells off Cranberry Head, should be waving at his lobster boat. Paddlers knew to alert larger vessels, like the 45-foot D.P. Clipper, if they didn’t want to be swamped by a distracted captain. But as Mawhinney closed with care on the smaller boat he realized something wasn’t right—the sideward angle at which the man was tilted, the renewed urgency of his gestures. And then he saw it: the kayaker’s other hand gripped the life jacket of a second person, a hunched shape half-submerged in the turbulent waters of the bay. Sudden clarity: the strange dorsal profile that had bobbed past the D.P. Clipper a few minutes ago, flotsam pulled by the legendary draw of the Bay of Fundy’s incoming tide—that must have been the second man’s kayak. Mawhinney had heard chatter on the marine radio earlier in the afternoon about some sort of race on the bay, and he understood now that there must have been an accident. If the capsized kayaker had been immersed for long in these cold waters, the situation was dire. Timing their efforts with the steep crescendo of the swells, his crew of three—his two teenaged sons and his first mate—pulled one young man, unconscious, from the water, and then grabbed the other and his kayak. Both wore only thin cycling clothes. His crew got them out of the rain and covered them in blankets, jackets, whatever they could find. The kayaker who’d signalled him, an Asian man in his early twenties, shivered uncontrollably and asked how his friend was. Mawhinney pressed his fingers to the other boy’s throat and then wrist—the skin icy, emptied of colour—but couldn’t find a pulse. He called his wife and told her to ring 911, to get an ambulance down to Chance Harbour fast. Then he dropped the throttle and aimed for the wharf. Adventure racing has been around at least since 1989, when the original Raid Gauloises invited international teams to New Zealand for a week-long wilderness odyssey by foot, raft, canoe and horseback. Even five years ago, though, such multi-sport ultra-marathons still barely rated a blip on the cultural radar of most Canadians. But televised coverage of the Eco-Challenge, the most successfully marketed expedition race in the world, has magnified the profile of the sport and increased the level of participation. The greatest growth has been in single-day "sprint-style" events that let curious competitors sample the challenges of the sport. The annual Fundy Multi-Sport Race, held near Saint John, New Brunswick, is one of many such introductory adventure races that have proliferated across the country. The race’s organizers—Jayme Frank, 27, and Sara Vlug, 28—are what demographers like to describe as "early adopters." Frank and Vlug discovered adventure racing after university and embraced the sport, competing with a variety of teammates as often as they could. The popular young couple quickly established themselves as a leading squad on the loose circuit of national events. Their next goal was to become—in a quote from a Web site bio—"one of the world’s top teams." Locally, they recognized the potential of their home by the sea and in 2000 held the first Fundy Multi-Sport Race, helped by Vlug’s parents, who run an outdoor store in downtown Saint John and a guiding service under the banner of Eastern Outdoors. Bob Vlug supplied the kayaking gear and advertised the race, while his daughter and her boyfriend organized the event. Drawing competitors from throughout the Maritimes, the single-day race doubled in size each of the next two years. The organizers located the course on roughly the same stretch of Fundy coastline, from the outskirts of Saint John west towards Dipper Harbour, where Jayme, a marine biologist, and Sara, a teacher, live next to her parents. Every year, they varied the route a little and juggled the order of the three stages. For the 2002 race, competitors would first run 15 kilometres, mountain bike for 40 more and then sea kayak 10 kilometres to the Vlugs’ beachfront property for the post-race barbecue and awards. Early on June 1, 69 racers marshalled near Saint John’s Irving Nature Park, better known to locals as Taylor’s Island. Once the last had paid fees and signed waivers, course maps were distributed—an electronic version had been sent out several weeks before—and Jayme Frank gave the participants a rundown of the route and a primer in kayak safety. At 9:30 a.m., the race began. The day warmed quickly, and so did the runners, pressing hard around the forest trails and Fundy beachfront that circumscribe the peninsular park. The field of competitors began to spread out more in the bike section. The first 30 or so kilometres led cyclists on an easy spin over an abandoned CPR line, while the last stretch mired their bikes in swampy ATV trails; the only technical obstacle proved to be a steep descent near the end that would send one rider to hospital with minor injuries. At 12:31 p.m., Mark Campbell, 35, and Shawn Amirault, 31, friends from the Halifax area and the most experienced adventure racers in the field, were the first to reach the kayak transition zone. Amirault had won, with a partner, the previous two Fundy Multi-Sport events; Campbell would compete later that fall at the gruelling Eco-Challenge in Fiji. Both were racing solo that day. Their goal: to beat even the two-person teams, who would gain a distinct advantage—two strokes to one—in the paddling section. Jayme Frank was there to help them select the fastest solo kayaks, sleek racing craft that sacrificed stability for speed, and they launched through two-foot breakers into McLaughlin’s Cove. As Campbell and Amirault paddled into Chance Harbour proper, then past the beacon on Reef Point that guarded the western exit onto the Bay of Fundy, the swells increased in size: six feet, seven and higher. The southwesterly wind mixed with the rising tide, and the waves began "haystacking," recalls Campbell—coming from irregular directions, breaking unexpectedly. (Environment Canada recorded wind speeds of 20 to 25 knots, average wave heights of six-and-a-half feet, and water temperature between 8 and 10°C for the Fundy region that afternoon.) The two racers had decided to portage an ugly projection of rocky shallows known as Dry Ledge when an erratic breaker caught Campbell and flipped his boat. He climbed onto his kayak as Amirault inflated a paddle-float. Two paddlers in a trailing double-kayak had seen their predicament, and helped pump out the boat and get Campbell back into the cockpit. A thickset 200 pounds, he would have fared better in the chilling water than the leaner triathletes, but he nevertheless realized he was too cold to continue. Campbell and Amirault had decided to head for land when they were approached by a small safety Zodiac. Two race officials—Sara Vlug’s brother, Owen, and another employee of Eastern Outdoors—offered to take them back to the start, and Campbell climbed aboard. The Zodiac struggled through the swells with Campbell and his kayak, passing most of the other racers as they emerged from the cove. It was a sight that left many with a mixture of relief and concern: There was a safety vessel watching out for them, yes. But were the conditions out there so bad that they might need it, too? What they could not have known is that this Zodiac—the only motorized race vessel on the water that day—would not return to the bay. Shawn Amirault had only continued for another 15 minutes when a rogue wave knocked him over as well. Several other racers now spotted him trying to clamber onto his boat. A co-ed team of university friends from Halifax reached him first in a double-boat, and were joined by two solo racers. Rafting up their kayaks, the racers emptied the water from the capsized boat and settled Amirault back into it. Keith Mawhinney, a lobster fisherman like his brother Bob, had been coming home to Dipper Harbour after hauling and baiting his traps, alone on his 42-foot boat, Benevolence. He had passed one group of kayaks near Dry Ledge—a poor place to be paddling, he figured, on a windy afternoon like this—before he spotted this second huddle of boats waving to him. He asked if they were all right, and while the others insisted they’d continue, Amirault wanted off the water. The trick, then: how to get him up and into the Benevolence? As Mawhinney reached for the racer with his sharply hooked gaff and the two men locked in a brief yet dangerous tug-of-war, the swells repeatedly hurled two of the kayaks against the steep side of the lobster boat. Once aboard, Amirault vomited several times. "I just couldn’t handle the cold of the water—not that anybody could," he recalls. "I’d never seen my body in that type of state." He’d been in the bay for about 10 minutes. Mawhinney wrapped him in blankets and a jacket, and then looped back to look for the first kayakers he had seen. But the occupants of the only boat he encountered, a double, dismissed his entreaties: "Everything’s fine!" they told him. He rushed Amirault to the wharf at Dipper Harbour, where a race volunteer said he would drive the still-shivering racer to the Vlugs’ house to warm up. "They didn’t seem to be in any panic," says Mawhinney. "They did say that they had somebody overseeing the race, a boat looking to see if everyone was okay." So Mawhinney tied up Benevolence and headed home—a decision he still regrets. "I guess now I should have done more. I was under the assumption that they knew what they were doing." Peter Hancock would be the first to admit he didn’t know what he was doing on the Bay of Fundy that afternoon. The 39-year-old technology director had been convinced by friends at the lead smelter where he worked in Bathurst, New Brunswick, to join them for the race. A competitive road cyclist, he’d only paddled a kayak once before, on flat water. But his friends weren’t much better, and no one had inquired about his experience when he registered. "That didn’t seem to be a prerequisite," he says. Hancock wasn’t far onto the waters of Chance Harbour, in third place, before he realized that conditions might be beyond his limited kayaking skills. He’d started to head back when another solo racer noticed him struggling with his boat’s steering. Jim Currie, a 40-year-old pharmaceutical manager from Halifax, helped his fellow competitor drop his rudder, pump dry his cockpit and properly fit its sprayskirt. "Let’s make a pact," Currie suggested. "Let’s just put the race aside and finish this thing. If one of us turns around, we both turn around." Hancock agreed, and together they paddled for another 30 or 40 minutes. But as they skirted Reef Point and headed farther offshore to avoid Dry Ledge, the sea conditions only worsened, and in the troughs of what were now eight-foot-plus swells, the two racers began to lose sight of each other. "It was nuts," Hancock remembers. "It was the make-or-break spot in the course." He decided again to turn around, and Currie did the same—a tough call for a veteran of dozens of triathlons and adventure races who had never not finished an event. "I would have rather sea-kayaked onto shore and carried the boat," he admits. "But I’d made the commitment to him, and he was quite nerved up." They paddled into the protection of McLaughlin’s Cove, and as they passed more boats heading out, Hancock warned each, "It’s worse the farther you get!" Then both paddlers swamped in the surf and had to drag their kayaks the final 200 feet. They found Jayme Frank—and the Zodiac—up on the beach. "Jayme, it’s too dangerous out there for this kayaking section," said Currie, who has raced against both organizers and considers them friends. "We cancelled it," Frank replied. "We’re trying to get people out of the water." After the Zodiac had struggled back to the shore and couldn’t be relaunched, Frank stopped racers as they arrived at the kayak zone and asked them to continue biking instead to Dipper Harbour along the coast road. But the only safety boat now on the water, a double kayak, had no radio, so its two race volunteers didn’t know that the paddling section had been cut off. A dozen or more kayaks were still strung out along the 10-kilometre stretch of coast. Currie and Hancock climbed into a waiting truck, now a warm-up shack for competitors who had bailed out of the race. Mark Campbell was already inside and dubbed it "The Shame Wagon," but Hancock replied, "There’s no shame in self-preservation." Jayme Frank drove Campbell and Hancock to the finish line in Dipper Harbour—"He was starting to freak out and wonder what to do," recalls Hancock—while Currie took a separate vehicle filled with other racers’ gear. Currie’s parents had been waiting for him at the finish line, and as they returned with him in their Ford Explorer to pick up his mountain bike, they spotted a pair of soaking figures—"two drowned rats," in Currie’s words—shambling out of the brush on the highway’s south shoulder. Sara Vlug was with them. She flagged down the SUV and asked if the Curries could ferry the racers to her parents’ house. Bob LeClair, 34, and Bob Carreau, 46—known as the Two Bobs to their friends in Bathurst—had beached their double-kayak on the shore below, one of several teams to abandon the course midway. Both had run many serious endurance races before, but neither was especially experienced in a kayak. While their two-person vessel, with its extra width and ballast, provided more stability than a solo boat, they’d taken on water launching through the surf, and it slowly filled with more as the waves crashed over their sprayskirts. After nearly two hours of paddling, their hands had gone numb from the wind and sea spray, and both had fallen into an anxious quiet. Every few seconds, they had to brace with their paddles to keep from overturning into the bay. A swatch of rocky beach, backed by a forested slope, offered a possible escape from their looming hypothermia, and the two friends made a rough surf landing. "I was quite disoriented, uncontrollably shaking," recalls Carreau. "I was thinking all we had to do was get in that bush and lie down and be fine." As the Two Bobs searched for a path up the slope, the race’s organizers appeared in a double-kayak. Jayme Frank and Sara Vlug had paddled out from Dipper Harbour, in neoprene wetsuits, to run a reverse sweep of the course when they spotted the Bobs less than a kilometre from the finish line. "You guys are almost there!" Vlug told them. "We’ll help you run up and down the hill to warm up. You’re so close, we’ll paddle with you." The Two Bobs declined—they’d had enough. So Vlug led the unsteady racers up to the highway and helped them into the Explorer. Crouched in the back, Carreau couldn’t tame his shivering body, and his head drummed against the inside roof. "Is it that bad out there?" asked Currie’s mother. In a hushed voice—but one that both Bobs overheard—Vlug replied, "No, it’s not that bad." Back at the finish line, her parents’ house had been filling with competitors who’d completed the race, either by boat or by bike, as well as those who had abandoned the course or turned back. Deanna Vlug, Sara’s mother, fed them hot chocolate and warm food, and offered dry clothes as they emerged from the shower. But as the afternoon progressed, the mood shifted, turned nervous. The phone kept ringing: the RCMP, the Coast Guard. Eventually, the thrum of a rescue plane. Periodic roll calls of the missing: Has anybody seen this person? That team? One name was called out again and again. "There was mass confusion over who was accounted for," recalls Peter Hancock. Relieved to be reunited with his friends, he turned to them and said, "If someone doesn’t die from this, it will be a miracle." That night the local radio stations reported the death of René Gabriel Arseneault, a 22-year-old from the town of Rothesay, just east of Saint John. Several competitors only learned of the accident when friends called to check if they were okay. Constable Wayne Burke of the RCMP, who had responded to the 911 call, issued a press release: "Mr. Arseneault was participating in a kayak race," it read, "when an incoming thunder storm suddenly caused high seas on the Bay of Fundy. Arseneault’s kayak overturned as a result of his extreme fatigue, and he was unable to get back inside. A fellow racer tried to assist, and held onto Mr. Arseneault for the best part of an hour, at which time the fishing vessel D.P. Clipper...rescued Arseneault from the icy waters." He had been rushed by ambulance to Saint John Regional Hospital, where he’d been pronounced dead, presumably of hypothermia. Articles appeared in the Saint John newspaper, and several questioned the safety of sea kayaking on the bay and of "extreme races that push athletes to the limit." Two weeks later, Sara Vlug and Jayme Frank emailed a "Post Race Update" to a list of participants: "By now I am sure everyone knows about the horrible tragedy that occurred during the race on June 1st," it read in part. "Something went terribly wrong that day and we may never know the entire truth." The organizers spoke with local reporters immediately following the event but declined subsequent requests for an interview. After consulting with the crown prosecutor, the RCMP announced they would not pursue criminal charges. Meanwhile, the provincial coroner’s office continues to investigate the incident and will issue a report later this year. Outside of Saint John, there was little coverage of the accident, but news of the first adventure-racing competitor to die in North America filtered through the sport’s Internet-linked subculture. "We were all waiting for it to happen," one adventure-race insider told me. "We just tried to make sure it didn’t happen at one of our races." Given the risks that draw competitors to the sport and the unpredictable environments in which they compete, it’s surprising there haven’t been more fatalities. Last April, a 27-year-old woman died of a heart attack at the end of a four-day race in Argentina. The same month—in the most bizarre incident—a competitor at a multi-sport race organized for a mountaineering congress in the Philippines was found dead (allegedly from alcohol-induced altitude sickness) after he returned to the course to retrieve a "rock" he was supposed to carry across the finish line. The most high-profile accident occurred in 2001 at the St. Moritz Challenge, a six-day event in Switzerland that had been billed as the World Championships of Adventure Racing, at which Vlug and Frank also competed. In a canyoneering section, Scottish racer Carolyn Jones was pinned under water for up to 20 minutes; she remained in a coma for eight weeks, and is now wheelchair-bound with brain damage. But until last summer, the only adventure-racing death in Canada had been a media official who drowned after his vehicle plunged into a river at a 1999 Raid the North event in Fernie, B.C. Race organizers across the country waited for fallout from the Fundy death. Some argued that the Multi-Sport Race shouldn’t be considered an adventure race proper, rather an "off-road triathlon," as the event allowed solo competitors and required no orienteering, while teamwork and wilderness navigation have always been cornerstones of the sport. But most realized that such nuances of taxonomy would be lost on the general public, investigating officials and especially insurance companies. Organizers had already experienced dramatic spikes in their premiums over the past year—tripling in some cases, despite no claims filed—as the insurance industry tried to recoup its post-September 11 payouts. A wrongful-death suit or just bad publicity from the incident could jack up premiums to the few insurers still willing to cover outdoor-adventure events. With new scrutiny on their events, race organizers became extra-cautious in their safety measures. Frontier Adventure Racing, the Toronto-based company behind the Raid the North series, was holding a 36-hour and an eight-hour race on July 20 along the Bay of Fundy. Eastern Outdoors was to act as the local co-organizer—a first for Frontier, which was exploring franchising possibilities. (They’ve since decided against it.) On June 19, Dave Zietsma, race director of Frontier Adventure Racing, sent team captains an email, explaining that the "events of June 1st have brought us to reconsider the protocol for the kayak portion of the race." Safety measures would include a minimum of three safety boats, a shortened kayak leg, disqualification of teams that paddled more than 100 metres from shore, and the requirement that, should bad weather arise, all teams had to beach and radio race officials. Frontier Adventure Racing supplied the mandatory-gear list for participants. It contained a conspicuous difference from the Fundy Multi-Sport Race, decided before the June 1 tragedy: kayakers had to wear wetsuits. "The issue is extra cost for competitors," says Zietsma of why some cold-water races don’t demand the added protection. "I look at it like: you just can’t do without it. So we found a company that would rent them cheaply." There’s no how-to manual for hosting an adventure race—various organizers told me that they’d learned through trial-and-hopefully-not-too-serious-error—and no sanctioning body monitors the sport. The single-day events that introduce participants to adventure racing exist in an especially grey area of self-regulation. "Unfortunately, anyone can hang out a shingle and put on a race," says Steve Menzie, co-founder of Adventure Racing Canada and organizer of the Eco-Challenge’s North American qualifier. "No one has the intent of doing anything that’s unsafe, but A) in many cases they just don’t know—it’s one thing to do a number of races, it’s completely another to organize one. And B) in many cases they just don’t have the resources to hire medical personnel or a support staff or vehicles or work through contingency plans." Even before the incident, there had been several attempts to establish an overseeing agency for the expanding industry. One of them, the four-year-old United States Adventure Racing Association, began to approach Canadian organizers last year. Frontier Adventure Racing’s Dave Zietsma, who is also one of our country’s top competitors, was unimpressed with the overly general "sanctioning requirements" prescribed by the USARA. Instead, he has been drafting a more detailed set of standards that address specifics on three levels of race safety: participant preparedness, course design and management, and incident protocol. He hopes that these guidelines might become a model for other races, too. Ultimately, Zietsma feels that the tabloid headline that dogs the sport—"Is adventure racing safe?"—is the wrong question to pose. "Adventure racing is never going to be as safe as a running race or triathlon. It has inherent risks," he says. "Let’s stop talking about whether it’s safe or not safe. Let’s ask: Is it a quality event? And to me, a quality adventure race matches the competitors’ preparedness with the challenges of the race course." By that standard, though, some participants at the Fundy Multi-Sport Race have wondered about the "quality" of their experience. "It was billed as your totally fun introduction to adventure racing," says one racer who completed the course. "It turned out to be something totally different. We didn’t go down for a walk in the park. But the kayaking section turned out to be a nightmare." Bob Leclair agrees: "I think the organizers’ biggest failure was that they didn’t know what they were working with." What they were working with that day turned out to be a group of fit, determined after-work athletes who launched onto the Bay of Fundy with widely varying levels of paddling experience. Robin Lang, a former member of Canada’s whitewater team, finished in the first boat to reach Dipper Harbour. "This is going to be tough for a lot of people," he remembers thinking when he and his partner reached the open bay. "There were a lot of runners and bikers. But kayaking was their weakest link." While past participants were shocked by the news of a death at the race, some weren’t surprised. Tanya Chisholm, a 35-year-old canoeing and orienteering instructor from Nova Scotia, had competed solo in the 2001 Fundy Multi-Sport Race. The dearth of checkpoints and safety boats had bothered her enough that she had planned to enter the 2002 event so she could take notes and file a formal complaint with the organizers. But an ankle broken while mountain biking kept her from returning. "I thought the whole thing was shabby," she says. "They announced it as a beginner course. For a true beginner, it could have been very dangerous." Nobody remembers exactly when René Arseneault started running seriously, perhaps because he always seemed in motion: drumming on his dad’s dashboard, dancing with friends, riding his motorbike up to Fundy National Park. "He seemed to have an itinerary for every day of his life," recalls his mother, Jacqueline. A naturally gifted young athlete with a keen competitive spirit, Arseneault excelled at all the typical sports of his Rothesay peers (hockey, baseball) but also picked up others (a few years ago, it was badminton) and mastered them within months. "You almost wanted to invent something he wouldn’t be good at," jokes Andre, the oldest of René’s three brothers. Most of all, he loved to win—a game, a race, an argument. "René, is it always about winning?" his mother would ask. "Mom," he’d reply, "you don’t train this hard to lose." Three times a week or more, he would run a 13-kilometre loop from his father’s house down Old Rothesay Road, waving to neighbours and customers from the grocery store where he worked. In 2001, he’d completed the half-marathon at the Saint John’s Marathon by the Sea; the coming summer, he planned to tackle the full 26 miles. That René should sign up for the Fundy Multi-Sport Race surprised no one—though the kayaking would pose a new challenge. "He didn’t swim well," recalls one close friend. "I don’t know how many people knew he was afraid of the water." That wouldn’t stop him. He took a few paddling lessons and pored over the background material for the race. Past midnight, in the early hours of June 1, his father returned from work, and Arseneault, still awake, got up to talk more about the race—he was that anxious to compete. When morning came at last, he went to his mother’s house and met his brother, who was lending him a mountain bike and driving him to the start area. After dropping René off, Andre Arseneault, an associate producer for Rogers Television, began gathering footage of the event for a story about local interest in adventure racing. By coincidence, he was filming at the kayak transition area as his brother arrived in fourth place, at 1:00 p.m., and handed him his mud-splattered sunglasses. "He was so focused," Andre recalls. "He couldn’t move fast enough." Another spectator, John Brett, also knew Arseneault. An experienced kayaker, Brett helped Arseneault into his boat and asked if he had paddled much before. "Not a lot," Arseneault admitted. "If you get into problems," Brett told him, "be sure to look for the Zodiac." And then Arseneault punched through the surf and was gone. Some time after he hit the water, the safety Zodiac launched from the beach; it would soon be preoccupied with bringing Mark Campbell back to shore. A half-kilometre from the start, Arseneault encountered two other race officials in a double-kayak. Jon Pike, a friend of the organizers, had headed out in the boat with another volunteer, who worked at Eastern Outdoors, as the first racers arrived at Chance Harbour. They had been asked to monitor the mouth of the cove and keep racers from going too far offshore. An hour or so into their patrol, they saw Arseneault fussing with his boat and paddled up to help. As his partner adjusted Arseneault’s rudder pedals, Pike warned that conditions would only get worse on the open bay. "Are you sure you want to do this?" Pike asked. "I’ve come this far," Arseneault replied. "I want to finish the race." Pike asked again, and Arseneault insisted he was fine. Farther out, a team in a double-boat caught up with Arseneault and noticed him struggling. "He said he was still going on," recalls Joe Kennedy, who spoke with him briefly. "He wasn’t paddling very strong. But he wasn’t in any trouble." The last hours of René Arseneault’s life are difficult to reconstruct, and excruciating to contemplate. As he approached Reef Point, Arseneault, wearing only a cycling jersey, would have felt the cold from the wind and the waves breaking over his bow. Like other racers, he had arrived at the kayak section—after three-and-a-half hours of physical effort—tired, hungry and probably dehydrated. Still, warmed by the mid-afternoon sun, few people who had brought insulating clothes or waterproof tops stopped to put them on. Most were underdressed and starting to fatigue when they hit the worst sections of the bay. "The only way you could add more factors for hypothermia," says one racer who finished the course, "was if you had people chug beer before they got into their boats." Arseneault’s situation couldn’t have been helped by the sprayskirt that had been supplied to keep his kayak’s cockpit dry. Nylon not neoprene, the sprayskirts proved the most common complaint among racers. "Those skirts leaked like sieves," recalls one competitor. "The skirts made a big difference," says another. "They were terrible." Arseneault would have soon faced the same Catch-22 that other racers did: the sea water that leaked through his sprayskirt with each wave would have slowed his boat, made it more unstable and drained his warmth as it pooled around his ankles. He could have bilged out the water, but that would expose his open cockpit, as he fumbled with the hand-pump, to a broadside by one of the breaking swells—a daunting prospect for an inexperienced paddler. His energy must have flagged out on the bay, for when Arseneault sighted another solo boat, he blew his safety whistle and paddled up to it. Boon Kek, a university student from Singapore, had completed the Fundy race the year before—but unofficially, 15 minutes after the cut-off time. This year he was determined to finish under the time limit. As the two racers held onto each other’s kayaks, Arseneault admitted to Kek that he was feeling cold and tired and hungry. Kek gave him an energy bar, and they weighed their options. "I wanted to get on with it, and he wanted to turn back," Kek recalls. "I told him it didn’t make sense paddling back. We were almost halfway there." They agreed to press on. But as soon as Kek removed his hand, his new companion’s kayak flipped—that quickly, that unexpectedly. The extreme cold of the water was an abrupt shock, and Arseneault instinctively kicked himself free of his overturned kayak and bobbed to the surface in his lifejacket. He tried to drag himself atop the plastic boat to escape the enervating chill of the bay, but it would have been like trying to balance on a greased log in the pitching swells. Kek asked Arseneault if he had learned how to perform a self-rescue, a technique that capsized kayakers use to balance their wobbly boats for re-entry. He didn’t reply. "Even if he knew how," Kek reflects now, "conditions wouldn’t have allowed it." They tried to pump the kayak dry, without success. "It was no use," says Kek. "The waves kept coming in." Kek blew his own whistle but couldn’t see any other boats. The nearest shore was cut off by the rocks of Dry Ledge, around which the tidal waters roiled. As Arseneault clung to his boat, a squall line suddenly blew off the land—a furious half-hour of wind and rain and lightning. Driven by the current, pounded by the storm, the two young men drifted east past the mouth of Chance Harbour, and Kek began to grow more frightened: "I knew they wouldn’t be able to find us because we were off-course." He asked Arseneault to hang onto the front of his boat, reluctantly let the water-loaded second kayak drift away and tried to paddle in the direction of the race course. But caught in the tidal rip, his boat didn’t seem to be moving—not forward at least. Arseneault’s body temperature would have succumbed quickly to the 10°C water. Desperate to free himself from its numbing chill, he tried to climb onto the back of Kek’s kayak—until the other racer shouted at him to get off. "I’m sure he was surprised at that," says Kek. "In my mind, if he capsized my kayak, there was no way both of us would get back." It’s a moment that still haunts him. "I was disappointed in myself," says Kek, who has yet to tell even his parents about his ordeal on the bay. "Maybe it was because I was taught to be so rational, so conservative, that it cost René. I notice these things in myself, but there wasn’t anything I could do to help." Arseneault had been in the water for nearly an hour and insisted that he had to get to shore, that he was cold, so very cold. But Cranberry Head, only 75 feet away now, formed a formidable face of rock, the waves surging against its rough base. ("There’s no place to get out," says Bob Mawhinney of the spot. "No inlets or nothing.") "That’s when he started to mumble and lose grip," recalls Kek. "I just grabbed him and pulled him to the side of my kayak." Holding Arseneault with both hands, Kek leaned sideways in his cockpit to maintain the boat’s precarious balance as his companion began to slip in and out of consciousness. Minutes later, he saw the D.P. Clipper, perhaps a kilometre away, and began to wave. "A boat’s coming," he assured Arseneault. After a few minutes more, at around 4:15 p.m., they were pulled from the sea and rushed to Chance Harbour. "In my mind," says Kek, "I thought René was still all right." At the wharf, Jayme Frank and Mawhinney’s sister, a nurse, boarded the boat and began CPR. An ambulance arrived half-an-hour later and rushed Arseneault to Saint John. At the hospital, Jean-Guy Arseneault, who’d been waiting for his son at the finish line, told Kek that the young man he’d only just met hadn’t survived. Four days later, Arseneault’s family and friends gathered at the funeral parlour, and Boon Kek saw for the first time one of René’s brothers—the family resemblance was striking, undeniable. Only then did the full truth force itself upon him: that he had tried so hard to hold on to René Arseneault, and it still wasn’t enough. The first Mawhinneys settled the Fundy coast around 1812, and likely began fishing its waters soon after that. From the age of nine, Bob Mawhinney helped his father—now 80, and still lobstering, too—and has tended his own traps for over two decades. The picture window of his family room opens onto a panorama of the bay, calm again after a fierce January gale. On a Sunday respite from the winter lobster season, Mawhinney tells me that he holds no ill will for the organizers of the Fundy Multi-Sport Race, neighbours of his down the coast road in Dipper Harbour. But he’s still bothered by what he saw on the water that day. "It didn’t need to happen. It could have—and probably should have—been avoided," he says in his unhurried drawl. "There’s a lot of precautions they could have taken." More rescue craft. Mandatory wetsuits. Mobile radios. Simple hand flares. "If Boon had a hand flare, that young fellow would’ve been rescued—someone would have seen it from Chance Harbour." To a mariner’s eye, the conditions were changing but not unpredictable. "Our forecast was given at 25 to 30 knots for that afternoon, and it reached that," says Mawhinney. "I daresay when they were launching the race from that beach, it was fine there. But as soon as you get around the point, you’re out in the wind, because that’s how the wind conditions behave in the spring...It was the worst time to go through that area, because there the tide comes early and goes down against the sou’west wind and builds up your sea. If you have a three- or four-knot tide, it just makes it rougher." His brother Keith, who plucked racer Shawn Amirault from the bay, agrees that kayakers of such inexperience shouldn’t have been out in those conditions. "I’m a fisherman. We’re taught to respect the sea and know what it can do and not to challenge it," he says. "These people were doing the exact opposite. It makes me angry to see that." The competitors themselves are less certain in their judgments. At least 23 of the 69 racers finished the complete course—three in solo boats, 10 in double-kayaks—and I tracked down nearly everyone who was on the water that day. For some, it was just another race they’d endured, even enjoyed, until news of the accident trickled back to the finish line and coloured forever their memories of that day. For others, the signs of potential calamity—novice kayakers, worsening conditions, too few safety boats—seem obvious in hindsight. All agree that they made their own choices, to turn back or push on, and bore the consequences of their actions—such is the underlying credo of the sport, of any outdoor activity. Every competitor with whom I spoke intended to race again, although several said not at the Fundy Multi-Sport event. (Jayme Frank and Sara Vlug continue to compete as Team Eastern Outdoors but haven’t announced whether the race will be held again this June.) But many returned home, having themselves approached the lip of disaster on the turbulent bay, with a more complex understanding of what they do and why. Bob Carreau is one of them. "Yes, I want to be challenged," he wrote in an email to the organizers after they asked racers for feedback about the event. "No, I don’t want to be catered to or involved in some bogus ‘armchair’ adventure where I get a certificate and a T-shirt that I can show the boys at work on Monday. But I need to know that the participants have thought out as much of the ‘what if’ scenarios as possible. We were a ‘team’ out there that day. I was on the same ‘team’ as you. A team that makes these events possible (either as an organizer, a support person or participant). If I had decided to go into the water or had turned around, then maybe others would have decided to do the same thing. Part of this tragedy was the fault of the participants—the ‘do or die’ mentality. Knowing this—you need to have someone (3rd party independent) that can make an unbiased decision at any point in the event to alter or terminate the race." He never heard back. For the Arseneault family, the last nine months have been a hollow time. Jacqueline, René’s mother, has only just emerged from the shell of her sorrow, and the reminders of her son—his motorcycle jacket, the empty chair around her dinner table—still draw her back into that bewildering grief. She has found a measure of comfort in the circle of René’s close friends and their efforts to never forget. Last August, four of them ran in the Marathon by the Sea in his memory, and she met them at the finish line. "We’ve tried hard to come to terms with this loss. To even begin to accept it, it hasn’t happened yet. If I accept it, it means I have to let him go," she says. "But I do want people to find out exactly what happened, so that my son has not died in vain—that every parent who has young children that love sports and love competition and, yes, love to win, be aware of what these sports are." The chief coroner for New Brunswick is still investigating the case and has promised the Arseneault family that her office will issue a report, and make a decision on whether to hold a public inquest, before the anniversary of René’s death. Jacqueline Arseneault hopes that such a forum might shed new light on the events of June 1, 2002, and improve safety at future adventure races. "Do we want them stopped? Certainly not. It was a part of René’s life. But somewhere along the line there’s got to be something that they’re supposed to follow for safety. I can’t bring my son back. But I can certainly try that no mother has to be told what I was told." * |
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